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Comment by jboggan | Hacker News Reader

Hypothesis: nicotine is a nootropic [0] good for say, 6 IQ points on average (Danish study I saw referenced, not linking unless I can find the original paper). The Hoover Dam and many other great infrastructure projects were created in the earlier 20th century when smoking was pervasive. Perhaps we were somewhat smarter in aggregate back then and that's why we can't engineer infrastructure at the same level anymore.

0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p...

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When they built the Hover Dam people lived in tents. In the desert. Without air conditioning. And, there was during the height of construction, (from memory so forgive inexactness) one day off a year. Christmas Day. And that was optional.

And people were happy to be working because they were in many cases about half starved. So they put up with it.

Contrast that with now. Medium articles about toxic passive aggressive workplaces from people making $120K/year and who spend a lot of that screwing around and in meetings. In air conditioned offices. And that's just the start!

Not suggesting we return to the bad old days, but that is one of the major differences. Nicotine is an extremely minor one.

There aren't 6 point differences between France, China, Japan, and the USA. It's more like 2 points. And if 2, or 6 points could double construction costs, then in the poorest countries like Africa everything would have to cost something like 100x more, which is definitely not the case.

Somehow you put the double construction costs in the middle of "IQ difference" and "we can't do it". Why?

This is only true for certain scales relating IQ to construction costs. The average IQ in Africa is, what, ~15 points lower than America? Suppose the first 2 points increase construction costs by a factor of 1.5, and each subsequent 2-point reduction by a smaller factor, until you reach some limit (IQ average too low to be realistic, NGO aid, something like that).

I don't believe we are lacking of people not smart enough to construct a dam. It's simply come down to litigation that prevents large scale infrastructure from being constructed. It's very difficult to build infrastructure in California due to lawsuits from environmental groups for example.

That's an interesting theory, but the Flynn effect raised IQ scores way more over the same time period. But if it makes you feel better, I still see a lot of people smoking on construction sites, so builders may be keeping the flame alive, so to speak.

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